Now the author of the comment is, I am sure, aware that local impact for atmospheric warming is as much as 75 times the impact of CO2. Given that this local impact may only hold for as much as one month, we might think that this is of no significance. Yet, were that month to be July or August, this would be of very significant impact.
Thanks for the responses all.
My concern is with our limited knowledge of the potency of methane itself. We talk in terms of it's heat trapping abilities 20 to 100 years after release into the atmosphere, which means we are calculating CO2 and water vapor impact, and not methane itself. I believe Sam Carana hypothesized that methane itself, before degradation, was up to 1000 times as potent as CO2. I have also heard hundreds used. (Someday maybe we will know the exact figure).
There's more to it than potency. There is also saturation. The response to GHGs is logarithmic. This means it takes more and more of the gas to achieve the same effect. So as an example, lets say it takes 1000 ppm of a gas to achieve 1 C of warming. To get another 1 C of warming you now need 2000 ppm. To get another 1C of warming after that it would require 4000 ppm. So on and so forth.
According to the IPCC AR5, methane is approximately 86 times more potent than CO2 over a 20 year span. And the reason why things like this are measured over long time spans is that, short of something like a PETM event, there won't be a spontaneous release large enough to cause an immediate impact.
If there are no reactive changes occurring to methane due to the ever shrinking OH budget allowing it to persist, and if methane is hundreds to a thousand times deadlier than CO2 to the atmosphere, AND we see continued hydrate releases as Shakhova did last year, at what point is the effect immediate and alarming.
Methane hydroxyl reduction is just one of many ways that methane breaks down. Methane simply does not last that long in our atmosphere. If it isn't being constantly replenished then it rapidly declines.
And as I mentioned before, it would take a tremendous release of methane to have any immediate effects. The effects of GHG increases are measured in degrees per decades or centuries so you can imagine what kind of increase would be needed to have a noticeable impact over the period of days or months.
And even IF there were such a massive local increase, it wouldn't stay put. Winds and weather patterns would quickly spread it out.
I realize that the answers to these questions are blowing in the wind, but I feel strongly that we need to include methane release in current observations.
Methane isn't being released in any amount that would have any significant or meaningful impact on short term arctic ice observations. Long term, yes, any additional GHGs will impact arctic ice formation and melting but that is a climatological phenomena happening over decades and centuries. Yearly/seasonal ice is primarily determined by ice conditions, weather, and ocean patterns.
One reason I am so concerned about methane is due to the fact that the world is retooling itself to run on the supposedly clean nat gas methane fuel, and we need to get science ahead of that cart, and the Arctic is probably the best place to learn the science as the methane releases are primarily local and short lived.
I'm pretty sure scientists understand methane. It isn't exactly a new compound, nor does it violate any known laws of chemistry or physics.
And methane IS cleaner. When you burn it, you get CO2 and water vapor. You get less CO2 than burning gasoline, and you don't get all the other pollutants that gasoline produces.
Is it a perfect solution? No. Is it better than what we have now? Yes.
I hope Im making sense.....
I also prefer using the term hydrate over clathrate as the energy industry uses the hydrate term and it's important for people to know that the fuel of the future is the same one scientists are so concerned about causing a possible extinction event. (Possible, on it's way or on going, take your pick).
You're being alarmist. Stick to the science. There have been multiple papers on the subject of arctic methane releases, an none of them make any claims of an upcoming "methane bomb". It takes a very specific set of circumstances for something like that to occur and currently the conditions just aren't there for it.
What will and is currently happening is that clathrates will continue to melt and add more methane into the atmosphere. This process will continue over decades, with the shallow shelf clathrates melting out first. It will contribute to the warming, but it isn't going to trigger a some runaway effect.
(PS. Just for the record I dont visit Real Climate. I was banned from that site for suggesting in 2009 that Obama was not going to do the things needed to curb climate change. The head honcho insulted me and deleted my comments. And they weren't harsh, just factual, as the Copenhagen Summit showed us when it became obvious that the US was the main glitch to an agreement with teeth.)
I very much doubt that was the only reason. I've been on RC for years and I've seen all kinds of troll/off-topic posts that didn't get deleted or banned. If you got banned, there was a reason for it.